by Joe Biden
A sharp new dynamic was rising. Steve and Mike had been getting calls for months from close friends in the Clinton campaign and people they had worked with on President Obama’s team. They tended to be fishing expeditions. So what are you guys up to? This isn’t for real, is it? But there was a new edge to the calls. The Clinton camp had started to rethink the old narrative they were pitching about my self-destructive, quixotic errand. Now they were saying that if I ran I was going to be such a powerful force that I would split the party in half, or take so many votes from Hillary that Bernie would waltz off with the nomination. Then the general election would be lost for sure. A few close advisers to Obama were still telling Steve and Mike we couldn’t win. Why don’t you get it?
The truth was, I was comfortable, as was the rest of the team, with our underdog status this early in the race. The increasing pushback made everybody a little bit angry and a lot determined. Steve made the case to anybody in the building who would listen that I had earned the right to make my own decision. And that no one should prejudge the race for the Democratic nomination before the first vote was cast. I could tell the people on my own team were starting to get their game faces on by the beginning of October.
We called a meeting for October 5 to make a final judgment on whether or not we could put a first-rate team on the ground and raise the necessary money. Steve and Mike were there along with Greg Schultz and Michael Schrum, who had both been working on the nuts and bolts since July. Jill, Val, and Hunter were there. And Ted Kaufman. But the circle had widened now and included people like Bob Bauer and Anita Dunn, who had been key players on the Obama team. Bob, who had been White House legal counsel, had worked out an understanding with his firm that made it possible for him on his own time to act as one of my key personal advisers as I worked through this decision. I sat, almost stunned, as they talked through mechanics. It was clear we had the time to meet all the state filing deadlines. We knew exactly how much money we would need to compete in the first four states and we had the means to raise it—even with our decision not to take advantage of super PACs that could receive unlimited donations from wealthy individuals. We had commitments from more than fifty specific individuals, each with a track record of raising a minimum of $250,000 for Obama-Biden, who were all willing to do it again for Biden 2016. We just had to ask.
Greg Schultz had identified state directors in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. He had lined up the best organizers in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. It was clear there was plenty of talent left, and they were ready to get on board. Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director, was already in the room. Pete Rouse, who had been Obama’s deputy chief of staff, had agreed to join us too. I was really proud to see how many former members of President Obama’s campaign team, his White House staff, and even members of his cabinet were willing to pitch in to help me.
We had put together an impressive list of endorsements. Anita had a media plan for an announcement in two weeks, or in three. We were ready to find office space in Wilmington for the headquarters. By the end of the meeting it was clear to everybody in the room that we had the ability to staff a first-rate field operation and the capacity to raise the money to get us through the first four contests. I hadn’t been sure of any of that at the beginning of July, but I was certain of it on October 5. Only one thing could stop me now—and that was me.
* * *
The next day, October 6, a story in Politico really threw me. The staff didn’t even want me to see the headline—EXCLUSIVE: BIDEN HIMSELF LEAKED WORD OF HIS SON’S DYING WISH. “Joe Biden has been making his 2016 deliberations all about his late son since August,” the Politico story said. “Aug. 1, to be exact—the day renowned Hillary Clinton critic Maureen Dowd published a column that marked a turning point in the presidential speculation.… Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times.”
I should have seen this coming, I guess.
But the Politico story exceeded even my worst expectations of what the opposition was going to be like. The idea that I would use my son’s death to political advantage was sickening. I didn’t think anybody would believe the charge, but I could feel my anger rise. And I understood the danger of that, especially in my present emotional state. If this thing about Beau came up somewhere in my hearing, I was afraid I would not be able to control my rage. And I would say or do something I would regret.
* * *
What turned out to be our final campaign meeting ran late into the night on Tuesday, October 20. The staff was still going through the specifics of the rollout when I noticed Mike Donilon really watching me. Mike had known me for thirty years. He had been at my side as we developed our message for 2016, and he had pushed back hard at all the naysayers along the way. “Don’t take this away from him,” he would say. Mike later told me that looking at me that night, as it got to zero hour, he could see my jaw clenching tighter. The pain he read on my face was off the charts. Mike also knew that Jill would have supported the decision to go, but he thought he saw dread in her eyes. I caught him looking at me and gestured, What is it, Mike?
“I don’t think you should do this,” he said.
It was the first time he had spoken against my running in the two years we had been talking about it. I understood Mike wasn’t speaking as a political strategist, because I knew how profoundly he believed in my candidacy and that he still believed, like I did, that we could win. He was speaking as a friend.
When I sent everybody home that night, it was time for me to decide—and I did. The first person I told was Jill, then Hunter and Ashley.
* * *
I got up the next morning and called President Obama to let him know. Then I called Steve and Mike. Steve got on the phone with the White House chief of staff, who told him that the president had already said he would do whatever he could to help me. Barack made the generous offer to stand next to me when I made my announcement and invited us to come to the Rose Garden, behind the Oval Office, to do it there. Mike and Steve drove to the Naval Observatory early that morning and got in the car with me so we could spend the short ride to the White House talking about my remarks. “It’s the right thing to do for the family,” I told Mike on the way over. “It’s the right thing to do for me.”
* * *
The president had Jill and me into the Oval Office to review what I was going to say that morning; he could not have been more supportive. I knew I’d made the right decision when I walked into the Rose Garden with Jill on one side and Barack on the other to explain that I could not make the commitment required to run. Time had run out. The grieving process, I said, “doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.” And I was still grieving.
I made sure to be upbeat, to keep my shoulders back, to smile. I had no prepared speech, just notes, but I knew I wanted to make it clear that I was still optimistic about the future of the country and that I was not going to stop speaking out. “I believe we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart, and I think we can. It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition, not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.… Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take.” And, almost as an afterthought, I said that I did have one regret. “If I could be anything,” I said, “I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer, because it’s possible.”
Mike was there in the Rose Garden that day, just observing. “Joe Biden looked a little less pained,” he would later say, “and a little less alive.”
EPILOGUE
I was back in the air again on December 6, heading for Kyiv, adding to my million-plus miles traveled as vice president. I had been invited to address the members
of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, and I felt that this was as important a speech as I had ever made in Europe. Ukraine was at the crossroads of history at the end of 2015. I wanted to mark this moment, and to remind the men and women sitting in the Rada that they were on the cusp of something extraordinary and—like all the most worthwhile things in life—extraordinarily fragile. I had been working hard on the big themes of the speech for weeks, focusing not only on the language of the remarks but the tone I wanted to strike in delivering it. I was still emending the text as we flew east toward Europe.
At the front of my mind were the hundred or so Ukrainian civilians who had been killed almost two years earlier in the Revolution of Dignity protests in Kyiv—the “Heavenly Hundred,” as they had come to be known. These Ukrainians were already enshrined as martyrs to the cause of liberty and independence, but they had been flesh and blood and bone, and had had reasons for hope and happiness, too. So I was also mindful of the very real pain suffered by a hundred families who had lost husbands, fathers, sons, wives, mothers, or daughters—and the thousands more who counted these people as dear and intimate friends. Those thousands of Ukrainians could still take solace in the possibility that the lives lost would be redeemed by a glorious new beginning for their country. Amidst fire and ice, snipers on rooftops, the Heavenly Hundred paid the ultimate price of patriots the world over, read the speech I was working through. Their blood and courage delivering to the Ukrainian people a second chance for freedom. Their sacrifice—to put it bluntly—is now your obligation.
Time was running out on the Ukrainian government to get it right. The country’s economy was cracking, while Vladimir Putin continued applying force at all the weakest pressure points: the supplies of energy, the bond market, the venality long endemic in both business and politics in Ukraine. Corruption was strangling economic growth, hollowing out the military, and destroying trust in government. The Rada had created the new National Anti-Corruption Bureau and staffed it with detectives, but the new agency had not yet prosecuted anyone, and graft was still rampant in both the major political parties. The prosecutor general was himself reported to be tainted by corruption. Dedicated members of the reform movement were losing heart; one of its leaders wondered if Ukraine was about to crumble as a viable state. It appeared as likely as not that the sacrifice of the Heavenly Hundred—as well as the thousands of other Ukrainians who had died in the fighting since—would come to naught. That was what I was walking into in my first trip back to Ukraine since just before Thanksgiving a year earlier.
The flight path to eastern Europe that December took us over the North Atlantic, where, on a clear day, the first speck of land you see below is Ireland—which has been a defining touchstone in my own personal and family history. One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: “To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.” I knew the truth of it before I ever heard Senator Moynihan speak it aloud, as should any descendant of the Blewitts of County Mayo, where the River Moy begins to widen and lose itself into the North Atlantic, and the Finnegans of County Lough, on a volatile little inlet of the Irish Sea. I had been knocked down hard enough by then to understand the Irishness of life, and this past year had reminded me of it all over again.
But that was not the whole story of Irishness to me—not even the half of it. “Keep the faith, Joey,” my grandfather Finnegan used to say to me when I walked out his door. “Remember, the best drop of blood in you is Irish.” We Irish, I like to tell people, are the only people in the world who are actually nostalgic about the future. I have never stopped being a dreamer. I refuse to stop believing in possibilities. Flying over the North Atlantic on Air Force Two, working on that speech to the Rada, reminded me of all that, as it reminded me of another driving force in life—one I suspected I shared with all the elected officials in the Rada.
One thing I know from working with politicians and national leaders across the world is that they are a lot more like me than unlike me. Most of us aspire to the same thing: the opportunity to be part of creating something truly consequential and meaningful for their country; the chance to be part of a historic moment and to be remembered for their courage and vision in having acted. So I believed I knew what kind of political sermon would move those Ukrainian legislators. When I was just barely a teenager, my mother asked me what I wanted to do, or be, when I grew up, and I only knew one thing for sure. I wanted to make a difference, to be part of some significant historical change. I guess it was because I was thinking about civil rights.
This drive is an undeniably powerful force, and I believe harnessing it in the service of something good is our best hope for the future. So as I prepared the speech, I understood I had to do a lot more than simply announce to the Ukrainian legislators an additional $190 million of direct aid from the United States; or to assure them that the U.S. and its allies were going to keep supporting them in the face of military and economic pressure from Putin and keep defending their right as a sovereign nation to make their own decisions and choose their own allies; or to remind them that they had to continue to root out the rampant corruption in their national politics. None of that would be enough for the job at hand. I felt I had to remind them of their higher purpose.
By the time I stepped to the podium in the Rada on December 7, I was determined to appeal to something beyond their immediate self-interest: the chance to bequeath to their children and grandchildren the freedom and democracy that had eluded them for centuries. So I told them they had arrived at a moment of being able to create a real, independent, and sustainable democracy in Ukraine that was akin to America’s own revolutionary moment more than two hundred years earlier. “It began when men of conscience stood up in legislative bodies representing every region in what was then Colonial America—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, very different interests—and declared in each of their regions the inherent rights of free people … the inherent right to be free,” I told them. “They took a vast continent and a diverse people—what John Adams, one of our Founding Fathers and future presidents, called ‘an unwieldy machine’—and they molded that unwieldy machine into a united representative democracy where people saw themselves as Americans first and citizens of their region second.” The accomplishment put Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, and dozens of others into the history books.
“You have a historic opportunity to be remembered as the Rada that finally and permanently laid in place the pillars of freedom that your people have longed for, yearned for, for so many years,” I told the whole of Ukraine’s elected body. “This is your moment. This is your responsibility.” They had to put aside the partisan and parochial, and strive for what Edmund Burke called “the general good.” If they succeeded, I really believed, their grandchildren would speak their names in hushed and reverent tones.
“This is all within your power,” I told the members of the Rada. “It’s within your hands. Nobody else’s—yours.”
* * *
Nobody ever told me a life in politics and public service would be easy; like life, I never expected politics to be free of disappointment or heartache. But I have always believed it was worth the effort. And having been in elective office and public service since I was twenty-seven years old, I had come to understand that all good things are hard and take time. It might take a generation or more to know if the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine had truly succeeded. Just as it would take a generation or more to know if the U.S. investment in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador would really transform those places into safe and secure democratic nations with expanding economies and a thriving and well-educated middle class. Just as it would be a generation or more before we knew if all the blood and treasure spent—and all the effort expended by Beau and hundreds of thousands of other American troops in Iraq—would birth an inclusive and un
ified democracy based on freedom and religious tolerance. I was determined even in my last year in office to do what I could to keep things moving in the right direction. And they were.
About a week after my return from Kyiv, Congress approved a $750 million appropriation for the Northern Triangle countries that I had invested an enormous amount of my personal time and reputation achieving. It was triple the previous year’s appropriation, and would be enough to begin helping political leaders in the Northern Triangle provide civil governments responsive to their respective citizens, as well as increased security and opportunity. And then, in the last week of December, with the assistance of United States military trainers and more than six hundred coalition air strikes carried out on ISIL targets, the Iraqi security forces won Ramadi back from the jihadists. Prime Minister Abadi’s coalition of Shia and Sunni fighters had taken the city, and they held it. Abadi’s commanders were already drawing up plans for clearing other key cities in Anbar and would eventually move on Mosul. It made me proud to know that when Abadi had called nine months earlier and said, “Joe, I need your help,” I went to bat for him. And I think it made a difference.